


Repilot

by TnT6713



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 15:59:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TnT6713/pseuds/TnT6713
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You still dream about the days when the names on your phone were never more personal than Hot Blonde Spanish Class. You miss owning the courtroom and your own condo. You miss rolling in cash, women everywhere you turn, not giving a fuck about anything at all. You really, really miss not caring."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Repilot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SkippyKangaroo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkippyKangaroo/gifts).



_I know a life-changing kiss when I see one_.

Annie’s great—really, she is—but every time you look at her, you feel like her father, and there’s something about the way she flirts with you that makes you feel like you need a shower to wash away the incest. She’s pretty and sweet and smart and you would hate yourself if you weren’t her friend—because you hate who you were before you were her friend—but she wants to be with you in ways that are too sophisticated and mature for her to understand. She’s still just a child. And you love her, yeah, you care about her, but she’s too young, too sheltered, too sugarcoated. You need something with grit, with bite, with mistakes larger than a handful of Adderall.

You still dream about the days when the names on your phone were never more personal than _Hot Blonde Spanish Class_. You miss owning the courtroom and your own condo. You miss rolling in cash, women everywhere you turn, not giving a fuck about anything at all. You really, really miss not caring.

Britta was never like you—she’s spent her entire life caring about things, about people, about _you_. You thought you could stay the person you were back when you were a big-shot, a lawyer, an asshole. But she wanted to change you. And somehow, without your knowledge or consent, she did.

_Wowee!_

* * *

 

You’re a bartender now.

You used to be a jet-setting, bourgeoisie-overthrowing, oppression-rejecting bombshell, who knew more about fighting for a cause than holding candles and selling brownies. You had a purpose. You were going to be arrested for trying to set fire to Congress and you were going to be incredible.

But you’re a bartender now.

You spent four years at a two-year college to get a degree in psychology even though you barely passed psychology and now you spend Tummy Tuesdays with your shirt off, letting men at whom you cannot even look sip tequila from your belly button. Bartending in real life isn’t how it seems in the movies. You can’t pour yourself a glass of bourbon and wait for strangers to tell you their problems. You need to pay for your own drinks or your manager will think you’re stealing. Very rarely do you get a customer who wants to talk about his or her problems while typical 80’s montage music plays in the background and everything fades to sepia—and on the occasions on which you do meet such people, your life has never once cut to the two of you waking up after a wild night in bed together, with all the problems you had been told the night before suddenly null. Maybe that kind of thing happens to Abed. But your life isn’t a movie and it isn’t a TV show and remembering exactly how to make each drink is a lot more difficult than you had thought it would be.

Sometimes, on Tummy Tuesdays, if you’ve made enough tips to buy yourself a drink or two or five, you can close your eyes and imagine these men—with their tongues and teeth and hands all over you—look a little bit like Ryan Seacrest with a six-inch forehead. You pretend you know how they laugh, how they smile, how they speak in monologues, how they believed in you when you told them you pretend your compassion is real just in case it isn’t. You toss and turn at night sometimes, too occupied with images of a man who changed you—who made you both better and worse—to sleep.

Troy’s a nice guy, really, he is. And you love him. A lot. You love Troy a lot. But he isn’t Jeff.

None of these guys will ever be Jeff.

* * *

 

So you guess the whole “being a lawyer” thing isn’t working out.

You’re stuck in a shit motel with a shit commercial and shit credentials and a steaming pile of shit instead of clients. Alan has screwed you out of _everything_ —your job, your house, your life, your reputation, your money, your firm, your attitude. He took away everything you had, everything you were. He sent you crawling to that shithole fucking community college, where you _met people_ and _took classes_ and _grew as a person_ —you went through _character development_ there, which makes you feel kind of sick.

You could have had Britta there.

And instead you got nothing.

So now you have to go back there, to the place that ruined your life, and try to sue it or save it or _something_ —and all you can think about are the memories of her that you’ve tried to repress. Everywhere you turn in that godforsaken school, something will remind you of something she did or something she said or the way she looked or the feel of her hands in your hair—

You can’t do this.

You _won’t_ do this.

If you weren’t broke, you wouldn’t do this.

* * *

 

If you weren’t broke, you wouldn’t do this.

Or if Abed hadn’t asked, you wouldn’t do this. But you can’t say “No” to him. You really can’t. He still feels like your son, like you need to take care of him—if only you could take care of yourself. But Troy and Annie are doing a good job of it, you think. They’re keeping an eye on him when you can’t. You almost wish you were the same person you were back when all of this started, back when you were paying for his film classes and playing the role of his mother beside Jeff—you remember you couldn’t help but think that the three of you would have made a good family, that maybe you weren’t meant to be married but you were meant to be married to Jeff, and you remember how much that thought used to make you sick.

The two of them flipped some sort of maternal, domestic switch inside you, awakening these unruly feelings inside you that came to fruition at Shirley’s wedding—which was almost your wedding. You finally succumbed to your fate as the next in a long line of wives and mothers, women without ambition, women who donate their lives to servicing their men—it makes you feel dirty and wrong, but there’s some disturbing, traitorous part of you that thinks it maybe wouldn’t be so bad with the right person. Maybe if you found someone as damaged as you are, someone you wouldn’t want to fix, because maybe he’s worse when he’s fixed or maybe trying to fix him would ruin the tenuous respect you have for each other. But you wouldn’t mind not fixing him. You’re a really shitty therapist anyway.

* * *

 

She looks beautiful in the dim light of what used to be the study room.

It’s almost distracting.

Okay, it’s really, really distracting.

* * *

 

He looks like shit, which is a little bit comforting.

His suit doesn’t fit him as well as it should, but Annie and Troy and Shirley and Abed probably won’t notice—you only notice because you’ve spent so long staring at him when he gets dressed up that you know how he should look and you know immediately that this is not it.

He looks like he hasn’t slept in about six months.

You kind of just want to hold him and kiss his neck.

* * *

 

You hold her hand as the table blazes before you. It feels like coming home, the way a repilot should feel. (But it isn’t actually a repilot—you’re only thinking that to placate Abed, because it makes him happy, or something.)

Her hand fits in yours, like it was meant to be there.

Maybe Greendale isn’t so bad.

* * *

 

He asks you when you got so stupid.

You ask him when his face got so stupid.

He kisses you, feverish and desperate and slow, five years of something you cannot name poured into one singular point of contact, two souls—if you believed people have souls, which you don’t—meeting and meshing and fitting together like puzzle pieces that maybe weren’t meant to fit together so well in the beginning but through time and erosion and more than one beating now click effortlessly.

You would be disgusted with yourself if you didn’t feel so giddy.

* * *

 

Her apartment might be nicer than yours for the first time in your memory. You don’t even mind being watched by her one-eyed cat as you hold her, your hands on her skin, everything igniting under your touch.

You two are beautiful and sad, like some great literary heroes neither of you know because somewhere along the way, no one in your little ragtag team of misfits remembered to be the literary one. But it’s just as well this way. You’re terrible with metaphors. And you know she is, too.

She tastes like peach schnapps and take-out, and you think you’re starting to love it.

* * *

 

You love him.

And he kisses like he loves you, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Belated Hanukkah gift (ridiculously belated) for my sister. Hashtag OTP. Hashtag Six Seasons and a Movie. Hashtag my feels.


End file.
